One
Year Object Relations Day Program for Practicing Clinicians& for
the New
Graduates of the Training Institutes

Location:

115 E 9th street, 12P,
NY, NY 10003.

Instructor:

Susan
Kavaler-Adler, PhD, ABPP, NPsyA, DLitt

Tuition:

$3000 per year. Payment plan can be arranged.

Description:

Curriculum consists of five 7-week semesters (total 35 weeks)
of theoretical part which is accompanied by the “Analyst as Instrument” group
supervision component. Students
of this program will benefit from experiential learning of how to process
“objective countertransference,” and of concepts of the “transitional space” &
“transitional object,” “holding environment,” “psychic container,” and
“projective identification.”

Course 1:The
Theories of Melanie Klein

Who is an “interpreting subject”
who can receive symbolic interpretations in treatment, and who
isn’t?

Who is an “historical subject”
who can experience the psychic reality of time and responsibility
for the limits and progression of their lives, and who endlessly
repeats the delusion of “starting all over again”?

How is a symbolic level of
understanding and self-reflective capacity achieved (which
sometimes called “mentalization”) and when is it not?

Course 2:
D. W. Winnicott's
Writings and Theories

D. W.
Winnicott transformed the practice of psychoanalysis, enlarging its scope to
understand the developmental progressions, disruptions, and traumas that take
place within with the whole, or the leaking container, of the "mother-infant
matrix."

This
Program’s unique curriculum features the supervision groups where the group
processis used as a learning medium. The experiential dimension of
psychoanalytic learning is introduced here, and it includes processing of
“objective countertransference” feelings, associations, and visceral
experiences.

Perhaps Freud could be
considered the first Object Relations Theorist, when in 1917, in
“Mourning and Melancholia” he exclaimed “The shadow of the Object falls
upon the Ego,” but it was
Ronald Fairbairn who explicitly built a theory of object relations
thinking from the
premise that the
basic and core human striving is towards “connection,” and thus towards
reality through connection, as opposed to holding on to any theory of
primary narcissism
as Freud and even Margaret Mahler have done.

Fairbairn was the first
to envision what all our infant research has validated, that the craving for the primal
other dominates each human beings life,
often causing profound dissociative splitting, and sealing off of the
potential self, when this primal connection is traumatically disrupted,
resulting in an internal drama where the vacuum cleaner sucking feeling
of early need is experienced as the evisceration, robbing, entrapping,
exploiting, or draining of the self. And wasn’t it Fairbairn who spoke
of the “poison pie”
parent who must
be swallowed whole when there is no other psychic food that could be
good enough to eat and digest? Wasn’t it also Fairbairn who spoke of
“the moral defense”
that compelled deprived, abandoned, abused, and generally traumatized
children to always blame themselves so as to psychically survive in a
world with the parents they were forced to totally depend on, preserving
the idealized image of the parent at the price of the emaciation of the
soul, when psychic annihilation would have been the alternative, the
child who must
chose to be “Satan in a world ruled by God than to be God in a world
ruled by Satan.”
Fairbairn played with the vocabulary he had learned when training to be
a minister in Scotland, a period in his biography much prior to his
excursions to London to speak at the British Psychoanalytic Society,
side by side with Melanie Klein, who like him spoke of profound dynamic
internal objects--so different than the symbolic level “introjects” that
American theorists had mistakenly taken for granted.

This Seven Week course
will touch on all this seminal theory along with Fairbairn’s clinical
contributions related to visceral
body enactments
in hysteria, and the somatic body enactments that go further into
playing out their monotone primal dramas in the internal world as
internal body object repetitions. As Shakespeare’s Hamlet said to
Horatio in a Renaissance world that thought that educated reason and
intellect could explain things, “There are more things in Heaven and
Earth Horatio than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” And wouldn’t
Fairbairn be the perfect theorist to describe the phenomena of Hamlet’s
“Ghost,” when he spoke of people in psychological purgatory throughout a
lifetime unless object relations treatment might slowly intervene.
According to Fairbairn, we are all haunted by ghosts, the ghosts of our internal objects,
so much more trenchantly alive than “introjects” that require a level of
symbolic evolution that only small parts of us ascertain. Those
interested in a prelude can read “Nightmares and Object Relations
Theory,” (winner of a Wohlberg Memorial Award) by Dr. Susan
Kavaler-Adler, in
Nightmares: Psychological and Biological Foundations
(1987), edited by Dr. Henry Kellerman...

Course 4: Theories of
Wilfred Bion

This course on Wilfred Bion’s theories will have readings and
discussions related to Wilfred Bion as a theorist of clinical
technique. Lectures and discussions will embrace Bion’s dialectic with
Melanie Klein and the Neo-Kleinians in relation to the Every Day
Containment and Processing of the essentials of what
psychotherapy patients “put into us,” during the nitty
gritty experience of sitting with the patient whose internal experience
cannot yet be adequately verbalized at a symbolic level. Course
participants will learn how to differentiate between Bion’s “attacks
on linking” and Bion’s ideas on therapeutic “containment,”
which go beyond D.W.Winnicott’s “holding environment,” while building on
this theoretical construct of clinical technique.

When we dip into Hanna Segal’s “Notes on Symbol Formation,” we see how
those at a protosymbolic level, due to developmental arrest, and as seen
in all borderline, narcissistic, and schizoid character disorders, -
relate to people and parts of themselves as “things in themselves”
alla the “symbolic equation” rather than as entities with
psychological meaning and representational form. This results in
obviating the neurotic transference developments of classical analysis,
and thus demands an object relations approach to teach the processing of
the clinician’s experience in the treatment room. An object relations
approach teaches the journey of “reverie” in the midst of
preoedipal pre-symbolic enactments, which can eventually evolve into a
symbolic level understanding, and allowing “alpha function” to develop
in patients, as they transform into “interpreting subjects”
who can use interpretations that reflect representational meanings.
Attendees of this course will learn about the phenomenon of
developmental evolution in relation to affect experience, so that Betty
Joseph’s ideas on “psychic pain” can be understood as a
psychic birth that operates in dialectic and
distinction from the developmental journey of the mournful
suffering of object loss.

Course 5:Theories of
American Object Relations Theorists

In this course different
theorists from the British and American Schools of Object Relations theory will
be discussed and an attempt will be made to integrate their theoretical
contributions especially as they appear in the work of James Masterson, Althea
Horner, Thomas Ogden, and Susan Kavaler-Adler.
The various theories will be illuminated through case presentations.

Object Relations Institute for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis (Training
Foundation) is a 501(c) (3) nonprofit educational organization. EIN # 133697333.
Your donations are tax-deductible, while they help tremendously to keep down the
costs of our training and to continue to offer free educational activities and
events. To contribute, please use PayPal.Me/ORINYC
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